The present invention relates to a method for maintaining an information processing apparatus from a remote place, and more particularly to a method for performing maintenance by switching a program which is loaded upon start-up of an information processing apparatus to a maintenance program which is held in a server on a network as requested by an operator at a remote place.
The maintenance program must be run on the information processing apparatus without operating an operating system. Therefore, the information processing apparatus requiring the execution of the maintenance program is generally maintained by booting the system from removable media such as a floppy disk and running the maintenance program stored on the removable media by a maintenance person on the spot.
An example of the remote maintenance is disclosed in JP-A-10-214183 which relates to a technology to update firmware on the information processing apparatus from a remote place. According to the above disclosed technology, the information processing apparatus is designed to always get a boot program from a remote boot process on a network so to realize the remote update of firmware on the information processing apparatus.
Specifically, when the information processing apparatus is booted, the remote boot process compares a version of the firmware stored in the information processing apparatus with a version of the latest firmware. If the version of firmware of the information processing apparatus is old, the remote boot process automatically sends a firmware update program. If the information processing apparatus has the latest version of firmware, the remote boot process sends a boot program for normal operations to the information processing apparatus.
By configuring as described above, JP-A-10-214183 can update the firmware of the information processing apparatus to the latest version upon a system reset of the subject information processing apparatus after preparing new firmware for a server.